Picture Perfect

  Alex smiled and poured some into my glass. "This doesn't stain as badly as papaya," he said. He lifted his own glass and clinked it against mine. The sound, like the lightest of bells, carried on the wind.

  "I guess we should toast to the movie," I said.

  "No." Alex leaned so close I could smell the spice of his aftershave. "I think we should definitely toast to you."

  I watched the fluted glass come up to his lips, and then I turned away to stare at the flickering candles. Our entrees were sitting beneath silver domes on the cot across the tent. Perched on a rickety shelf were two individual fruit tarts. "You're making it very hard for me to stay angry," I said.

  "Well," Alex said, "at least I'm finally doingsomething right."

  I blushed, staring down at my plate. I wanted him to serve the food. Sing. Shout. Anything but look at me like that.

  I could find my way across a desert by noting the position of the sun. I knew how to put a skull back together when it was split into fifty pieces. I could run complicated computer analyses that explained the significance of a bone's dimensions. But I could not sit at a dinner table across from a man and feel at ease.

  I just didn't have much practical experience with it. And any fantasies I'd harbored didn't cover the pitfalls that cropped up in reality: the long moments where there was nothing to say, the horrible echo of a dropped spoon against my plate, the way Alex could stare at me as if he saw right through my skin. I thought about the heroines in those books I had read during the flight to Tanzania. Most of them would have tossed their long, flowing hair over their backs by now and parted their cherry lips and leaned invitingly over the table. All of them knew how to tease and how to flirt. At the very least, they'd be able to make conversation without looking like fools.

  But Alex knew nothing about anthropology, and I knew nothing about movies. Talking about the weather in Tanzania was pointless, since it stayed constant for months. He didn't want to hear about my flight over. Without the shield of anger I had worn into the tent as protection, I had very little to say to Alex Rivers. He probably was wondering what had made him invite me to dinner in the first place.

  "So tell me, Cassandra Barrett--"

  "Cassie," I said automatically. I looked up at him. "You can call me Cassie."

  "Cassie, then. Tell me how you wound up chipping away at rocks in the African desert."

  I leaped into the conversation, grateful for the chance todo something. "I was a tomboy," I said. "I liked to play in the dirt."

  He walked toward a low wooden crate I hadn't noticed and pulled out two small silver bowls packed in ice. "Shrimp cocktail?" he said.

  I smiled as he set the plate in front of me. "How did youdo this?" I said, shaking my head.

  Alex lifted a shrimp on the tiny fork. "If I told you, it wouldn't be magic anymore."

  We ate quietly, and I watched the candles dance shadows on his cheeks and light the edges of his hair. He was golden, that was the word. I'd look at him one moment and see a man asking me about my courses at UCLA, and then I'd take a breath and see Apollo himself.

  During the main course, Alex mentioned that he had been born outside of New Orleans. "My father was a doctor and mymaman , well, she's just the most beautiful woman I've ever seen." He smiled. "I remember watching her in her garden when she thought no one else was around. She'd pull off her straw sunbonnet and turn her face up to the sky and laugh like she was the happiest woman in the world."

  I looked into my plate, thinking of my own mother, who would have traded everything she owned to get back to the South. I thought of how I'd watch her when she thought no one was looking, bent over her tumbler of bourbon, toasting herself. I closed my eyes, trying to picture what it must have been like to grow up as a child in Alex Rivers's family.

  "My daddy didn't much care for acting," Alex said. "But then he saw me in a play in college--Tulane--and he became my number-one fan. Up till he died a few years back, he kept the promotional posters of every film I was in hanging on the walls of his office."

  "And your mother still lives in New Orleans?" I said.

  "Tried getting her to move to L.A., but she wouldn't do it. She said her roots have grown too deep to dig up now."

  I tried to conjure the pictures my mother had colored in my mind of the South, a land of grace and blue-leafed willows and iced drinks with crushed mint. It seemed as different from L.A. as I was to Alex Rivers. "You must miss New Orleans," I said. "Hollywood's got to be a different world."

  Alex shrugged. "I grew up in one of those old French mansions," he said. "Black shutters and climbing roses and scrolled iron benches in the garden. When I came to L.A. and made it big, I built a house just like it in Bel-Air." He smirked. "Of course, if you've been on one of those Star Tours, you've probably even seen the mailbox."

  I smiled at him. "And just how did you know you'd made it big?"

  Alex laughed. "One day I was at the grocery store. It was just afterLight and Shadows was released--that was the Vietnam film. Anyway, I was in the produce aisle and I was squeezing cantaloupes, you know, like my mother showed me when I was in college, to test them for ripeness. So I finally chose two and made my way down to the scallions, and I looked back to see a crowd around the melons. All these women were grabbing the cantaloupes I'd picked up but didn't take--the damngreen ones--and telling each other they'd gotten one Alex Rivers had touched." He grinned. "That's the worst part," he said. "I can't go anywhere. I can't do anything. I have absolutely no privacy. That day, in 1987, was the last time I went grocery shopping."

  "What do you do for food?" I asked, horrified.

  "I hire people. I have someone to buy my food, buy my clothes, make my phone calls, drive me around. Christ, I could probably hire someone to go to the bathroom for me if I wanted to."

  "Ah," I said, smiling. "The advantages of being in a position of power." I stood up and cleared the two plates away--a delicious goose in plum sauce with a candied rice stuffing. "So what do youdo all day?"

  Alex laughed. "Come to think of it," he said, "very little."

  He refilled the champagne glasses while I carried the dessert to the table. "Blueberries," I said. "That's my favorite."

  I wasn't saying it just to be nice. You couldn't grow up in Maine andnot like blueberries; they grew wild in the woods between my house and Connor's. These weren't nearly as good--not that I was about to tell Alex--but they reminded me of summer and a life I'd had a hundred years before. I lifted the fork to my mouth and took another bite. "We used to pick blueberries in Maine," I said to Alex. "They grow all over the place, and we'd pluck them right off the bushes to eat." I smiled. "The warm ones were the best, because they tasted like the sun and they left purple stains on our fingers."

  Alex reached across the table to take my hand. He turned it over in his, slowly rubbing his fingertips across mine. "Here," he said, touching my palm as if he could see the marks. "And here." He glanced at me. "I wish I'd been the one with you."

  I pulled my hand away. I could feel a stream of sweat breaking across my back. "I think I'd better go," I said quickly. "Thank you for a wonderful dinner." I stood up before I could change my mind; before he could change it for me.

  Alex stared at me for a long minute, and then he got to his feet and unrolled his sleeves. He pulled on his dinner jacket and walked me outside the tent. The twin torches flaming at the entrance to the set painted the earth in shades of red that shimmered and started and burned. "I told John I'd drive you back," Alex said quietly. "I hope you don't mind."

  "I don't want to put you out," I said, but even as I did I knew there was no alternative. I would have been terrified to drive to the lodge myself this late at night; and it wasn't as if I could simply call a taxi.

  Alex helped me into the jeep and swung into the driver's side. He lit a cigarette, and that surprised me--I hadn't expected him to be the type to smoke. But he only took a few drags, and then he threw it out the window, so I was left without its glowing crimson tip t
o make out the lines of his face.

  He didn't say a word the entire way back to the lodge. I knew I had offended him, and I tried to rewind the evening in my mind, but other than our original argument, the only thing that might have been misconstrued was pulling my hand away from his. I just didn't want to make a mistake, that's all. I didn't know how to play the kind of casual games someone like Alex Rivers did.He'll get over it , I told myself.He's just not used to someone saying no .

  When he pulled the jeep to a stop in the parking lot of the lodge and opened my door, I tried to think of the most gracious way I could say goodnight without running the moment my feet touched the grass. Then I laughed. He was just a man. An actor. What was I so afraid of?

  Myself. I knew the answer even before Alex closed the car door, trapping me in between his arms. I had been afraid of what else he could do to me ever since I'd watched him act out my own dreams on film that afternoon. I took a step backward, pressing up against the side of the jeep. Alex stared at me, but he was standing in the shadows and all I could see was the remarkable silver of his eyes. "You're beautiful," he said simply.

  I turned away. "Don't lie," I said. "Don't act." I had heard myself described as intelligent, ambitious--but no one in my entire life had ever told me I was beautiful. I always thought that Connor might have, but he hadn't had the chance.

  I was angry all over again, as angry as I had been when the night started, because Alex Rivers had ruined a perfectly good evening. Before he'd opened his mouth, I could have looked back on this and smiled, remembering the time I'd dined by candlelight on the Serengeti. I could have gone to bed that night and closed my eyes and padded my recollections with sparkling conversation and the finest traces of romance, until it played just the way I'd wanted it to. But Alex had crossed the line with a blatant lie, and suddenly the whole night seemed like one big joke at my expense.

  Alex grabbed my shoulders. "I'm not lying," he said. "I'm certainly not acting." He shook me gently. "What is the matter with saying you're beautiful?"

  "Because I'm not," I said as easily as I could, hoping that might make it hurt a little less. "Look around you. Look at Janet what's-her-name, or any other actress you've worked with."

  He held my face between his hands. "You bring a sexy black dress to the middle of nowhere. You listen to me so carefully when I'm talking, you'd think I'm telling you the secrets of the universe. You're not afraid to tell me I'm an asshole when I'm being an asshole. And," he said, "you talk about picking blueberries like you were just doing it a few hours ago, so all I can see is that stain on your fingers and your lips. Cassie, if that isn't beauty, I don't know what is."

  He started to lean toward me, and I kept my eyes wide open when he kissed me because I wanted to see if I affected him the way he affected me. I could feel the heavy white moon at my shoulders, pushing me closer to Alex. I heard the steady beat of his heart and the soft whir of the fans in the lodge nearby and I started to believe that this was real.

  When he pulled away from me, his fingers were still resting on my throat, and they were shaking. I smiled at him. "I never said anything about a stain on my lips," I said.

  Alex put his arm around my waist. "I'm beginning to think this is the best film I'll ever make," he said. He helped me up the steps outside the lodge and into the main hallway. It was pitch dark, most of the other members of the cast and crew having gone to bed in anticipation of an early makeup call. He walked up the stairs beside me and led me to my door. With every step I could feel him pulling away. By the time he stood in front of my room, I wondered if I had imagined everything.

  Alex turned toward me, as if he meant to kiss me again, but instead he started speaking in a fast, furious whisper. "My father wasn't a doctor," he said. I noticed his voice was deeper, guttural; that his eyes burned the way they had earlier when he'd spoken of failure and fear. "The closest he ever came to a doctor's office was when he shot himself in the foot after drinking a fifth of scotch. I was his biggest disappointment because I turned out nothing like the son of a bitch, and he used to beat me up every now and again just to remind me how much better he was. Mymaman couldn't tell the difference between a hothouse flower and a plastic centerpiece. I came into this world bringing her pain and she never let me forget it. I spent my whole childhood hiding from the two of them and losing myself by pretending I was someone else. And the house I built in L.A. does exist in N'Orleans--but the nearest I ever came to it was spying from a tree in the woods out front, watching the little girls who lived there turning somersaults on the lawn and flipping up their skirts in the process." He took a deep breath. "That shit I told you over dinner is the story my PR woman wrote when I told her I needed a history. But I won't lie to you, and I won't act."

  My mouth dropped open. I wanted him to know that I liked this--the black truth--much more than his alter ego.

  I wanted to reach out to him, to tell him now about my mother, about my family.

  I touched my hands to the soft hair curling at his temples. Twice this night he had trusted me with the truth, and for this, I would help him. I was more qualified than he ever could have imagined. He whispered my name, and I leaned against him, running my hands down his back and marveling at how comfortably we fit together. The last thought I had before his lips touched mine was that Alex Rivers was a much better actor than anyone could guess.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A week after I started to spend all my free time with Alex Rivers, I began to dream about Connor at night. I had the same dream over and over. In it, Connor and I were both adults, but we were lying on our backs on one of the floating docks of Moosehead Lake. Connor kept pointing to the sky, outlining the patterns of the clouds. "What do you think?" he asked, several times, but to me every formation took the shape of Alex--his profile, his windblown hair, his sculpted jaw. I told this to Connor, going so far as to gesture, my palm pale against the bright summer blue. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get Connor to see.

  I had spent six days watching Alex acting as Rob, unearthing his skeleton and coming to a crisis of faith. He realizes that human evolution is following the same path as the evolution of this alien species he's found: a meteoric rush toward extinction. He decides to bury what he knows, rather than rewriting history.

  It surprised me that filming wasn't done in order, although I could certainly see the monetary advantages to shooting all the scenes in a given location at once. "How do you do it?" I had asked him. "How can you build up to the emotion you need in that last scene, and then go back and pretend it never happened?" And Alex had just smiled, and told me it was what he was paid to do.

  Hedid get emotionally involved; in spite of what he said he couldn't help it. It leaked out at night when he was just being himself. One evening we'd sat at the edge of Olduvai Gorge and Alex told me about the time he was fourteen, when his father had coaxed him back and forth across the living room, swatting at his face and his side in an effort to make Alex land a punch. When Alex finally did, knocking out several of his father's teeth, Andrew Riveaux had smiled through the blood.Boy , he'd said,that's the way a man fights .

  After a long silence, Alex lifted his eyes to mine. "Sometimes I think that if I held a press conference tomorrow and told the world that Alex Rivers had a deadbeat drunk father and a mother who was off the wall, no one would bother to print it anyway. They've all got this image of me, and they're not about to change it, and the funny thing is, I think the man they've made in their minds is going to outlive me."

  I reached for his hand, because I didn't know what I should say, but he gently pushed me away. "That's why I liked the script of this movie," he said. "It's a moral dilemma: Do you tell the public something they'd find appalling? Or do you let them go on believing what they need to?" He shook his head. "Makes you wonder about Darwin," he said.

  But no matter how much time I spent with Alex, Connor was the focus of my dreams at night. I had linked the two of them in my mind. I would fall asleep thinking o
f Alex and wake with Connor's name on my lips, as if Connor, jealous, had started threading his way into my subconscious. One night my dream was so vivid that when I woke up I could still feel Connor's breath on my cheek, and this worried me. Most of the time, Connor left me on my own. But when he thought I was in trouble, he was harder to shake than my own shadow.

  WE WERE WALTZING AROUND THE PERIMETER OF THE SHALLOW POND behind the lodge, keeping time to the sounds of an African night. "I can't keep up with you," I said, breathless. "You're going too fast."

  "You're going too slow." Alex whirled me around a curve, lifting me off the cool, dark ground. As he set me back on my bare feet, my ankle buckled, and I pulled him with me to roll down a gentle slope. With every turn his body braced mine, or mine supported him, a sensuous volley of power. We landed with our fingertips inches from the muddy water, Alex tangled beneath me.

  I tentatively rested my head on his chest. With the exception of that first goodnight kiss, this was the most bodily contact Alex and I had had. It was difficult to know what he wanted of me. Alex was friendly, open, but not physical. I wasn't sure if he was taking it slow; if he was taking itanywhere . As for me, well, I was hoping for more. In fact, I had braced myself for a one-night stand, and during the past week I had almost convinced myself that this would be all right, but Alex made no moves of seduction. More often than not, I reached out for Alex under all kinds of pretenses, shamelessly trying to prevent him from keeping his distance.

  I breathed in the scent of his soap and his sweat. "Sorry," I murmured. "Ballroom dancing was never my forte."

  Alex laughed, a deep rumbling sound against my ear. "It's an acquired talent," he said. "My mother used to make me take classes twice a week. I hated it--those white gloves and overperfumed fat girls who stepped on my feet--but damned if I don't still remember every step we ever learned."

  I smiled into his shirt. "You must have had an unconscious wish to escort a debutante. Or be Arthur Murray."